Yahoo Movies Will Ferrell Defends New Film 'Get Hard' Against Racism Claims
Will Ferrell has always skirted on the edge of good taste, but his latest movie ‘Get Hard’ has found him accused of racism.
The film, which premiered at the SXSW Festival in Texas last week, finds Ferrell playing a businessman who’s framed for embezzlement.
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He then hires a black employee Darnell, played by Kevin Hart, to school him in the ways of serving time, after wrongly presuming he’s been to jail.
The movie’s writer and director Etan Cohen was put on the back foot, after an audience member at the festival screening branded the film ‘racist as f**k’.
But now Ferrell has spoken out in its defence, saying that the joke is on his character, James King.
Speaking to Radar magazine, he said: “With all due respect to anyone who went to Harvard, including our director (Etan Cohen), I was thinking, ’Harvard a**hole’.
“As much as my character knows about financial dealings and how to make a lot of money, he really is completely ignorant about how the rest of the world works.”
It was after the screening at SXSW last week that an audience member stood up during the Q&A session afterwards and said: “As a fellow Jew, I’ve got to say that this film seemed racist as f**k.”
Cohen was said to have been taken aback by the remark.
“The truth was that was a really delicate balance. We wanted to think about this stuff and think about the stereotypes but not go too far where comedy doesn’t deserve to go,” he said.
When another audience member asked if they were perpetuating stereotypes rather than lampooning them, he added: “When you do satire, that’s a big problem. That’s a dangerous thing. It’s a very small window – that’s what we’re trying to find.”
But it seems that much of the critical community found the film to be on the wrong side of the fence, as it currently languishes with a lowly 36% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Drew Taylor of Playlist said: “Get Hard is an absolutely horrible, amateurishly assembled comedy that is more offensive than just about anything we’ve seen lately.”
Coming Soon’s Edward Douglas added: “Finally, a comedy that homophobes, racists and generally stupid people can all enjoy together!”
That said, some found the race gags handled better than others, though Vanity Fair’s Eric D. Snider found the movie’s ‘obsession’ with prison rape troubling.
“As a major Will Ferrell fan who is gay, I don’t find this line of humour offensive,” he writes. “It’s not mean-spirited, and it’s panicky straight guys, not gays, who are the target.
“It’s just disappointing, that’s all. Ferrell is better than this (the jury’s still out on Hart), and the premise of ‘Get Hard’ had real potential. It handles race and class issues with broad but incisive satire, getting laughs out of tough subjects.
“It’s with that other tough subject, the one it doesn’t know what to do with, that it gets bogged down. To paraphrase a classic Seinfeld line, it doesn’t offend me as a homosexual, it offends me as a comedian.”
The film is due out in the UK on March 27. You can check out the NSFW red band trailer below…
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Image credits: Warner Bros
